Karen Arkin, M.D. shared with Parade (as told to Diana Reese) the touching story of her son’s suicide to help raise awareness of Suicide Prevention Month and World Suicide Prevention Day.

The rest of my life will be divided into “before” and “after” we lost our beautiful boy on Tuesday, May 19, 2015. Jason was smart, funny, thoughtful and kind. He loved to dance, even when the music stopped playing. He had an easy smile and felt deep empathy for others. But he couldn’t accept that he wasn’t perfect.

These are the things I want people to understand about Jason Aaron Arkin and the disease that killed him:

1. Perfectionism defined my son. It was his driving force, but it was also his worst enemy. He said that it was the sole of his being. Jason was a National Merit Scholar and an Eagle Scout and he graduated in the top 1 percent of his high school class.

But he never learned how to ride a bicycle. The learning curve was just too steep and it frustrated him too much. If Jason couldn’t do it right from the beginning, he didn’t want to waste his time. He couldn’t let himself fail. I told Jason many times that perfection isn’t a human attribute.

2. Jason wanted to make the world a better place. He told me he “felt the collective pain of the world” when he was just a young boy. He had a huge heart and he helped others. Since his death, I’ve learned about two people he talked out of suicide.

3. Jason suffered from clinical depression and was diagnosed at the age of 12. He’d gone to a lecture at temple given by a couple whose son had died of suicide after years of torment from mental illness. Afterwards, Jason told me, “Mom, I’ve always felt that way.”

I was devastated – as shattered then as I would be on the day Jason died. From that moment on, my purpose in life was to keep him alive, to keep him going.

My husband, Steve, and I are both neurologists; we specialize in diseases of the brain. We had the knowledge. We had the resources. We had the energy. We had access to the best medical care possible. We gave Jason and his younger sister, Jennifer, the best life we could.

Through it all, we knew that clinical depression could be a fatal illness, just like a brain tumor or a stroke.

4. Jason died of suicide May 19, five days before his 21st birthday. Early that morning he took an overdose of his antidepressant and was discovered having a seizure in the fifth-floor lounge of his dorm at Northwestern University where he was a junior majoring in electrical engineering. We got the call at 6:15 and left for Chicago from our home in Overland Park, Kansas.

He died that afternoon.

Administrators at Northwestern suggested we let students believe a seizure was the cause of Jason’s death. But we didn’t want to hide the fact that it was suicide.

We shared it publicly – in his obituary, online through social media and at his memorial service. Jason’s high school girlfriend helped us write his obituary, which explained, “Jason struggled with clinical depression and ultimately passed due to his illness…in a time when mental illness remains stigmatized and misunderstood.”

Erasing that stigma has become our life’s mission.

5. Jason felt a hopelessness that I don’t think any of us can even begin to understand. He was never impulsive, and so I know his final act was one of profound desperation.

“I do not see happiness or fatherhood in my future,” he wrote in his suicide note, which I found on his laptop a month after his death.

6. Silence, along with shame, kill when it comes to mental illness and suicide.

Don’t treat depression as a “phase” that will be outgrown, or as a personal shortcoming, or as simply the response to a bad breakup. Suicide is the second-leading cause of death for teens and young adults in the United States.

Once kids reach 18, they’re legally considered adults, and it becomes almost impossible for parents to make medical appointments or force their children to get psychiatric help.

7. I can’t be angry at Jason. In fact, I think he was strong to last as long as he did on his arduous path. He’d told his girlfriend he was “holding a place for a friend in the future” – his future self. At the end, though, he felt that he was just too broken, and too unfixable.

His suicide wasn’t his fault. It wasn’t our fault. It was the fault of the disease of depression.

But there will always be a hole in my heart.

If you are considering suicide or need help, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255).

Since the death of Jason Arkin, his parents have teamed up with Allie Doss of Kansas City, Missouri, whose 16-year-old daughter, Sara Prideaux, died by suicide July 30, 2015, to form Speak Up (Suicide Prevention Education Awareness for Kids United as Partners). It’s a nonprofit foundation devoted to erasing the stigma and silence associated with mental illness and suicide by raising awareness and providing education for youth, parents, educators and community members. Funding supports suicide awareness training for teachers, motivational speakers for students, and the teen-driven mental health campaign, You Be You, created by Bernstein-Rein Advertising.

The third annual Speak Up walk will be held September 16 on the Garmin campus in Olathe, Kansas.

AMG/Parade Digital

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